Best Kept Secret (9 page)

Susanne laughed, a harsh, dry sound. “ ‘Some tension’? We’re strung tighter than a goddamn violin.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “How’s Anya doing?”

“She’s lovely. Daddy’s little girl. I think she loves him more than she loves me.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” I said. “I don’t think kids make those kinds of distinctions. He just spends more time with her. That’s all.”

“Ever since I went back to work, she doesn’t want me to help give her a bath. She doesn’t want me to read with her or cook her breakfast, or any of it. She doesn’t want
me
.” Her eyes welled with tears, but she tried to hide it by looking away and reaching for her empty glass.

“I’m sure it’s just a phase,” I reassured her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hope so.” She sighed. “Can I have another drink?”

“Of course,” I said. I stood up, but felt woozy and ended up falling backward onto the couch.

“Uh-oh,” Susanne said, laughing. “Time for rehab, Lindsay Lohan.”

I laughed, too, a short, staccato sound. “Yeah, I could use the vacation,” I said, then stumbled to the kitchen and grabbed us another bottle of wine.

S
ome say there is
a prescription written for a person in childhood determining whether or not they’ll develop a drinking problem. A family history of others who drink, a violent home environment, an angry father, or sexual abuse. One of these circumstances in your childhood? A good chance you’ll look to a substance as a way to numb it all out. Two circumstances or more? Pretty much guaranteed. I mean, really, who could blame you?

Serena, a woman in my treatment group, was raped by two of her cousins when she was nine. Her parents didn’t believe her when she told them; in fact, they beat her for lying. Those cousins raped her over and over again until her thirteenth birthday, when she shot one of them with her father’s gun. He lived and the police ended up ruling the shooting an accident. She snuck a bottle of rum from her parents’ liquor cabinet and got drunk that night. She pretty much stayed that way for thirty years until she landed in treatment on a court-ordered deferral after her fourth DUI. Now here’s a woman who has a reason to drink. Here’s a woman who people feel sympathy for. She was abused, of course she needed to find a way to cope. I’m disgusted with myself, really, how my story lacks the frightening qualifications that the other women in my group seem to share.

Looking back, I can’t find a reason for me to be in this nightmare. It doesn’t make any sense. This is not who I am. I made a
mistake. I overdid it just like I overdo everything else in my life. I’m not an alcoholic. Alcoholics live under bridges and swig from bottles tucked in brown paper bags. They beg for change on street corners and make offers to wash windshields while you’re stopped at a traffic light. That’s not me. That’s not my life. I graduated from college. I own a home. I shower on a regular basis. I still have all my teeth. I had a problem with drinking for a little while there, but it was just the wrong way to deal with the stress of being on my own with a toddler. I’ll do my time in the treatment program, get my attendance slip signed at AA like I’m required to, and get the hell out. I’ll tell Andi what she needs to hear to stand up in family court and assure the judge I’m cured. And then, I’ll get Charlie back and get on with my life.

So here I am, this sunny Saturday morning, practicing doing just that. After picking Charlie up from Alice, I take him to get his hair cut. I choose one of those generic, “we take walk-ins” kind of joints. There is an uneasiness in me while I do this simple errand with my son, a too-bright feeling. I hate it. It causes me to make silly, idle motherly chatter with this hairdresser. She is a melancholy young woman with a pierced upper lip and a pink frosted, blond crew cut. She has more black tribal tattoos than plain, pale visible skin. I wonder if covering her body like this is her own strange way of trying to disappear. The bass-driven music in the salon is nightmarishly loud, but I don’t have the courage to ask her to turn it down. I somehow feel like I don’t have the right.

“Charlie just loves getting his hair cut, don’t you, Charlie?” I say. I hate the high, false pitch of my voice. I’m anxious to appear like his mother again. “He fell asleep in the chair the first time the stylist used the buzz cutters on him. He loved it. Totally relaxed him. It was like he was getting a massage.”

The punk girl nods, visibly unimpressed. “Huh. Weird. You want it a two or a three cut?”

I experience a brief moment of panic, not able to remember what
length on the clippers I used to have my hairdresser use on my son. Shit. Mothers are supposed to know this kind of thing, like their son’s Social Security number or the exact time and date of his first successful stand-up pee. Unable to come up with it, I fake it.

“A three should work. We can always go shorter if we need to.” I say “we” like I’m somehow one and the same as my son. I suppose in some senses I am. I suppose this is why it’s excruciating to be forced to stay away from him.

It takes exactly twenty-two minutes to finish getting Charlie’s hair cut. It is 9:53 on a Saturday morning. Twenty-six hours to go, alone with my child. It looms frighteningly in front of me. I am alternately thrilled and terrified to have such a long stretch of time alone with him. Will I remember what to do? What I used to do was drink. Merlot, in a moss green coffee mug, the moment I staggered out of bed.

There is a wild, fluttery panic in my chest. I am not ready to take Charlie home. There’s no booze there, but there could be. It’s as easy as stopping at the corner grocery and picking up a bottle. “Drive a different way home,” Andi told all of us the first day of our group. “Grocery shop with a friend or shop online and have it delivered to your house. The only thing you’re going to have to change is everything.”

Her words alone exhausted me.
Really? I have to what? You’ve got to be joking.

I don’t want to drink. I abhor the idea. The thought of even a sip of alcohol makes the gorge rise in my throat. But I have been at this point before—physically appalled by the thought of taking a drink, and then, something will happen. Or not happen. And suddenly there I’d be, in the line at the store, bottles of wine in my grasp.
I’m smarter than this,
I’d think, and then, gradually, the thoughts would lessen as the alcohol took effect, until they disappeared altogether. Which was the point, I suppose. I’ve got too much at stake here. Martin’s trying to take my son. I need to get my shit together.

We get into the car, Charlie successfully buckled in again.
Now what?
My pulse races, thumping in my throat. I put my hands on the steering wheel and glance in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, champ. What do you feel like doing?” I used a cheery tone in the hopes of concealing my hesitance.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.” He picks his nose.

“Digging for gold there?”

“No!” His voice is snuffled—his finger remains in his nose as he speaks. He laughs, a rolling, belly giggle that warms me, slows my pulse a bit. “Boogers.”

My turn to laugh. “Lovely. Any luck?”

“Yep.” He holds up his finger triumphantly, showing me his find.

“Uh, that’s gross.” I twist around in my seat, snag a tissue from the box I keep in the console. I cry all of the time, even driving down the road. It hits me at the strangest moments, for no reason. For years, I have cried only alone, only in the dark. Much like I chose to drink. I realize there’s likely an interesting connection here, but I’m not sure I want to explore it. Andi would. Andi would have a field day with this particular nugget of insight.

I hold out the tissue to my son. “Here, gimme that, you booger monster.”

He giggles again. “I’m not a booger monster.” He pushes his finger into the tissue; I wipe it clean and shove the tissue into my purse.

“You’re not? Are you sure?”

“Yep.” He’s silent for a minute, seemingly thoughtful.
He’s five, Cadee,
I say to myself.
What does he have to be thoughtful about? The political climate of Sesame Street?

“Whatcha thinkin’?” I ask, hoping I sound lighthearted.

“Are you going to drink any more wine, again ever, Mama?”

Wham. There it is—the guilt, landing like a cannonball in my gut. I swallow twice before I’m able to respond, my voice hoarse. “No, baby, I’m not. Mama’s all done drinking wine.”

“Good!” is all he says, then kicks the back of my seat again.

I’ve asked myself a million times in the past two months if he could remember. I’ve wondered if he was aware, if he really knows what kind of person his mother is. Does he remember those last three days? Does he understand why his father came to take him away? His question is my answer.

“Did your daddy give you the cards I sent this week?” I’m anxious to say something to stem the tide of shame still pushing to overwhelm me. Since entering treatment, I’ve been mailing a note to my son at his father’s house a couple of times a week. Though Charlie will jabber my ear off in person, he’s not much of a telephone conversationalist. He listens silently as I chatter on about nothing and I hang up feeling worse than before I’d called. Self-loathing pounds through my blood after I set down the phone.
What have I done to him?
I worry that he doesn’t talk because he’s angry with me. He doesn’t talk because I’ve damaged our relationship beyond repair. He doesn’t talk because he hates me.

When I shared these thoughts with Andi, she assured me this was not the case and suggested I start sending the notes just to tell him how much I love him and to make sure he doesn’t believe his mother has simply disappeared.

“Yep, I got them!” Charlie says. “Daddy reads them to me and then I get to keep them in my room. He gave me a book and I get to use real grown-up tape to stick them in. It’s blue. With stars on it.” Something softens inside me toward Martin when I hear this. At least he’s not trying to erase me completely from my son’s life. I wonder if I should send a note directly to Martin, as well.
Please,
it would say.
Please let me have my son back.

Charlie claps his hands together once, excited. “I know what we can do! Let’s go see Aunt Jess! I want to see Marley and Jake!”

I twist back around to face the steering wheel, turn the key in the ignition. I don’t look in the rearview mirror; I can’t look at him. I refuse to look at myself. The engine roars to life and I pick up my cell
phone to call my sister and let her know we are on our way. “That’s a great idea, sweet boy. Aunt Jess is exactly what we need.”

From the day Jessica was born, our mother told us it was evident we would be close. I was barely a year older than my sister, so when Jess was no longer an infant and it was safe for us to sleep in the same crib, our mother said we curled up to each other like a pair of tiny, pink cooked shrimp. Even after we officially reached “big girl status,” and graduated to separate sleeping arrangements, Jess and I continued to sneak into one or the other’s bed until puberty rolled around and we learned there were certain activities better performed in private. We are reduced to hysterics still, every time we talk about this particular discovery, the summer night before I turned thirteen when she rolled toward me, twisted her head over her shoulder, and said, “What are you
doing
? Do you have a
bug bite
down there or something?” Obviously, I had thought she was already asleep.

Throughout our adolescence, whether we were in trouble with our mother or didn’t get asked to the dance by the boy we liked, one of us crept into the other’s bed when the house went dark. We whispered condolences, eventually giggling the disappointment away. Not that Jess missed out on too many dances; when we got to high school, she suddenly became the golden child, the adored popular girl. She was also genuinely nice, which made it impossible for me to really hate her, at least not consistently. Even when we fought, we loved each other fiercely. We still do. For a long time,
we
were all the other had.

I was in sixth grade when our mother decided she could no longer afford to pay someone to stay with Jess and me after school. Busy with work during the day and her dentistry classes three nights a week, there were times we saw our babysitters more than we saw our mother.

“You’re mature for your age,” she said to me as she sat on the edge of my bed to tuck me in. “You can watch out for your sister.” As with most of my mother’s statements, this was an edict, not an inquiry.

“But what if there’s a robber?” I asked.

“There won’t be, but Mrs. Stevens will be next door if you need her and you can always dial nine-one-one, right?” She hugged me. “You’ll be fine.”

Mrs. Stevens was in her seventies and I doubted she’d be of much assistance when it came to fending off a robber, but my mother was right. Over the next few years of spending most of our afternoons and evenings alone, Jess and I
were
fine. We called and checked in with our mom as soon as we were home safely, but after that, we were accountable to no one. We wasted hours watching reruns of
Three’s Company
and
The Love Boat,
though we always made sure we were finished with our homework before our mother walked through the front door. We couldn’t invite anyone over when she wasn’t there, so my sister and I didn’t have a lot of time to develop other friendships. A lot of the time we were bored.

“Maybe we should try to find our dad,” I said to Jess the summer before I started high school. I was almost fourteen and a little bitter about not being able to participate in debate club because my mother didn’t have time to transport me to and from events. The activity bus was reserved for the jocks, so academic students’ parents were expected to drive.

Jess screwed up her face, looking at me as though I were nuts. “Why would we want to do
that
?”

“I don’t know. I guess I wonder how he’d feel if he knew she left us alone all of the time.”

“
He
left us completely,” Jess said. “What makes you think he’d care?”